This Is the Van Cake, the Lowest Campervan in the World That's Only 3.3 ft High

Andy Saunders’ work lives on the very fine boundary between automobile fabrication and functional art, and his many, world-famous works often tiptoe around the boundary, leaning more into one side or the other. The one we’re going to discuss today, called the Van Cake (as in “pancake,” but with a van, a joke that becomes obvious the moment you see it), is more of a piece of functional art.

But it is incredibly awesome and came about in a very unique process, which, again, is somewhat of a given with many Saunders projects. The British customizer is a three-time Guinness Record holder, including one for the Van Cake, which was named the lowest campervan in the world in 2018, nearly ten years after its completion. It still holds that title to this day.

Saunders is also the owner of Aurora, once dubbed the safest car in the world, which he personally recovered and restored to its original glory, and the creator of the lowest MINI in the world, the Claustro Phobia. The Van Cake is another very special build, which came about as a piece of performance art at the BugJam 22, an annual festival for VW owners held at Santa Pod Raceway in Podington, Bedfordshire, UK.

The three-day event saw Saunders and his three-man team (Jim Chalmers, Johnny Munden and Pete Dempsey) work together to create what would become the lowest campervan ever. They started off with a perfectly functional and normally-sized 1980 Type 25 Volkswagen Camper Van that Saunders had bought on the second-hand market for £1,000, which is roughly $1,131 but at the current exchange rate. It had 70,000 miles (112,654 km) on the clock when he bought it.

They cut it down from 7.8 feet (2.33 meters) down to just 3.3 feet (0.99 meters), which implied a lot of changes in the drivetrain as well. The steering was moved centrally, under the conveniently-placed skylight – not a random choice, since otherwise, the driver would have had to drive the car with his head out the window.

A new steering system was put in, the handbrake and the gear stick were moved, a new fuel tank was put in, and the seat was lowered. As you can see in the old (and very low-quality) video interview below, when driving the Van Cake, Saunders had his elbows where his butt would have been prior to the conversion.

The team worked for three days non-stop with minimal breaks and no actual rest for what Saunders described as “not only the most ridiculously massive chop in the world, but [one that] was completed in the most ridiculous time frame and the most abstract conditions,” and his most challenging project. Because the project was done during the live event, they didn’t have the time to convert the interior too, so it was left bare.

Guinness notes that two more seats were added behind the centrally-positioned driver’s seat, and that, perhaps more impressively, the vehicle remained fully roadworthy – and was capable of going as fast as 80 mph (128.7 kph). Whoever would want to go that fast with the wind blowing directly into their face is a discussion best left for another day.

In the same interview included below, Saunders said the campervan was still suitable for sleeping, since you could always throw in a mattress and call it a bedroom on wheels. He also said that he planned to finish the interior in a very McLaren-like style, with carbon fiber, but he never did.

Speaking with autoevolution, Saunders recalls his father’s passing after the completion of the project, and how he couldn’t get himself to care about it anymore. Van Cake ended up sitting outside for almost a year, unfinished, before he sold it for parts. Whoever bought it sold it to the London Motor Museum, “but that closed a couple of years ago and I am sure then it got scrapped,” the artist explains. “I never got finished nor did it ever get the interior I had planned.”

Van Cake lives on in memory and again in the pages of Saunders’ autobiography, Automotive Alchemist, which will launch at the 2022 NEC Classic Motorshow next week.